LIKE ALL DIEHARD FANS, I follow West Indies cricket closely, through thick and thin. We rejoice when we win, a rarity these days, and are deeply depressed when we lose, all too regularly. A daily Jamaican voice on the call-in programmes said she no longer followed the men’s team, but would support the ladies who have been winning.
Cricket is deep in our DNA and has been the catalyst propelling us to world prominence and dominance covering the region’s six million people in global glory. It has been a major unifying force when all else was falling apart. To have produced the greatest cricketer the world has ever seen from a speck of dust in the ocean demonstrates that we are constrained neither by paucity of population nor size.
Recent remarks by the chief executive officer of the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB), Dr Ernest Hilaire, have sent shock waves across the region and beyond. Even if true, people in his position are expected to build functional diplomacy into their daily modus operandi – more so when we are all aware of the ongoing and disruptive friction between the WICB and West Indies Players Association (WIPA).
At the international level, it is irresponsible for the CEO of the WICB to hold West Indian players up to global ridicule, and it might well breed feelings of inferiority and hostility.
I cannot resile from saying that Hilaire’s comments will do nothing to shorten the three-year watershed which he envisions before there is any turnaround in West Indian fortunes. If his comments about the Under-19 players are accurate, the region’s primary and secondary schools, the incubators of these cricketers, stand seriously indicted.
Are we to believe that our primary schools are producing a minor generation of cricketing illiterates? Caribbean governments must shudder when this is the image presented to the world by the CEO of our cricket board. It would help if the estimable Dr Hilaire prescribed appropriate corrective action.
I number among my friends three former Barbados and West Indies players who rank among the most accomplished batsmen ever to play the game. Their formal education ended at primary school. Yet they are among the most engaging, witty and thoughtful personalities and astute students of the game I have ever met.
And as I reflect on West Indies cricket, I recall that as we transitioned from colonialism to sovereign nations, from mandatory white captains to outstanding Blacks, we also tried a “high brown” Cambridge University graduate.
C.L.R. James’ famous mantra “what do they know of cricket, who only cricket know” keeps ringing in my ears as I see the ambitious plans for the new High Performance Centre located at the Cave Hill Campus. I will never forget three deeply embarrassing off-field cricket-related events that seared my memory when being High Commissioner to Britain.
When in 1998 there was an impasse between the board and the players who were on their way to South Africa and dropped anchor in a hotel at Heathrow Airport, I was asked as the only accredited West Indian High Commissioner to South Africa to join two colleagues in speaking to the players.
We were deeply disappointed with the response to our entreaties. Equally disappointing was that the board, sending the first official team to South Africa, had not before they left educated them as ground-breaking ambassadors on what was expected of them and their basic regional responsibilities.
Earlier in 1995 the gregarious Wes Hall managed a team to England and there was a lavish banquet at Lord’s attended by the good and great of English cricket. I sat at a table with Wes, Colin Cowdrey, Ted Dexter, the MCC president and the doyen of cricket writer Jim Swanton.
Right after dinner, before the speeches, three players came to Wes saying they were not feeling well and wanted to return to the hotel. It looked bad. At the end of the function on entering my car the driver told me he thought dinner had finished over an hour before when he saw the players come out to sit in two cars with some girls. Wes plastered them.
My third disappointment was when Speaker of the House of Commons Her Honour Betty Boothroyd invited the team, high commissioners and Members of the Commons and Lords with West Indian roots to dinner at her Westminster quarters. After dinner, while some players fell asleep in the living room, one fellow did the unthinkable.
He made his way into the speaker’s bedroom and used her bed as a trampoline. Some weeks later when I attended a parliamentary ceremony and was introduced formally to the speaker, she responded saying she remembered me from the night that “big, long fellow went for a romp in my bed”. I was gobsmacked.
Incidentally, Wes made a speech on that tour which Sir Edward Heath, a former prime minister and in his 80s Father of the Commons, told me was the best after dinner speech he had ever heard. Not bad for a Combermere boy who did not make it to university. I told him Wes was an aggregate of preacher and politician.
I bring these matters to public attention because somewhere along the road to wearing the maroon cap, the ambition of every West Indian playing the game, our boys must be tutored in essential non-playing aspects of the game.
I trust that with the establishment of the new centre at Cave Hill, certain basic sensibilities and protocols for a comprehensive new beginning are built into the curriculum.
l Peter Simmons, a social scientist, is a former diplomat.
